I love this nationwide wailing and gnashing of teeth about the heat.
I grew up in the Deep South, so I earned my hot-weather badge at an early age. Now the rest of the country is in a sweaty panic because it’s hot in June.
In my Mississippi hometown, there was no such thing as a June heat wave. We had one heat wave every year, and it lasted from May to October.
As long as I wasn’t in school, I could have cared less. It never occurred to me and my friends there were places where melting asphalt was a novelty.
We were jacked up on the pure freedom only summer vacation could provide. There was no way something as inconsequential as the weather could spoil the fun.
Sure, we got hot. It was 92 in the shade. So we drank from the hose until our bellies sloshed, soaked our heads, picked up our bikes from where we’d dropped them in the grass, and resumed the day’s adventure.
We did not refer to this activity as “hydration.” It was known as “getting a drink from the hose.”
Yes, jeez, I’m a million years old. (“And we liked it!”) If I were you, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to read this far. We can’t all be number-one draft picks.
Here’s a concept: Acclimation. It works.
I know, because the first time I tried to use my AC this year, the fan motor in the central unit refused to turn.
I sprayed Dibbidy-40 on the blade shaft and whacked it with a screwdriver. (This is the sum total of my mechanical knowledge.)
Even Dibbidy-40, that miracle in a can, failed to make the motor run. So I opened all the windows and rounded up some fans.
When confronted with a problem of this complexity, I usually do absolutely nothing. Some call this laziness, but I like to think of it as giving the problem careful consideration.
Fortunately, my place is shaded by two big trees, an oak and a sweetgum. I barely noticed the heat after the first day or so, even though the temperature averaged in the high 90s and the humidity had maxed out.
I complained about not having air conditioning to my friends, but I didn’t really care. I was outside most of the time during the day, or I was in The Metal Building, a sweltering repository for a century’s worth of family heirlooms and junk. Mostly junk.
Cleaning out The Metal Building is an annual exercise in futility, because we are a family of pack rats. Old junk is pushed to the side for new junk. Towers of junk go up, collapse.
You can find anything in The Metal Building. There’s a freaking piano in there, okay?
However, The Metal Building is a great place to commune with my dead ancestors. I found a homemade knife. The handle was made of bone. (Just consider, for a moment, a world where you have to make your own knife.)
My middle brother, Sky King, came up for a visit. He wasn’t in his airport car, so I knew he hadn’t flown in.
“Hey, Sky King,” I said. “Where’s your airplane?”
“Too hot to fly,” he said. “We need to get you some AC. What’s the matter with it?”
I gave him the facts as I understood them, which took about three seconds.
“It’s probably just the motor,” he said. “We’ll fix it tomorrow.”
Right, I thought. He might as well have said It’s probably just the reactor core.
The next morning I was roused by banging sounds. By the time I stumbled outside with my first cup of coffee, Sky King had pulled the motor from its housing.
“You need a new motor,” he said.
“Okey dokey,” I said.
A couple of hours later, the new motor was humming away. There was air and conditioning.
“You’re Batman,” I told Sky King.
He shrugged it off. “Electricity, that’s kind of my deal.”
What a guy!
It’s nice to have AC again, especially after a long day working in the yard or the garden, or communing with my dead ancestors in The Metal Building.
They would find me soft and useless, I’m sure. I stare at the crude shelves jammed with rusted farm tools, and I sigh.
Somehow I know they’ll still be there, untouched, long after I’m gone.
_______________________________________________
John Hicks advises you to spray it with Dibbidy-40.
I like it when it’s hot outside, Mr. John. My mom and my dad does not. One time my mom said you don’t know what hot is. My dad said oh because you grew up in Missisipi? Because she did too. She said no. Missisipi is like baby hot. India is like wizard hot. She didn’t say wizard I did. She said it’s so hot people drink hot hot tea in the hot hot shade because they don’t feel the hot at all. I wish I could see your bone knife. Awesome.
Right. India is hotter. Sky King told me it is also very hot in Afghanistan. I’ll bet. I think sweating is good for you. Do it.
Did you say do it? I say that all the time too because people are lazy and I have to remind them a lot.
I stole it from you. Now I say it all the time.
You two make it clear why Mississippi is the storytelling capital of the world. Wonder if it has to do with heat? I’m from Alabama. We had hot as well of course, and some good storytelling. I suppose the lack of a written language accounts for the small number of great writers from there.
When it gets hot outside, I say, “More, please.” On the weekend I wait untill the sun is directly overhead, get on my bicyle and ride downtown, uptown, to Clinton sometimes. When I get back home I soak my head under the hose, soak my baseball cap and put it back on, walk up and down the hot block, letting my legs unwind.
PS My daddy made all our kitchen knives.
I grew up in a house in which you could see your breath in the summer because the air conditioning was running full blast.
I need a real photographer like Derek to take a wizard photo of the bone knife. I took 30 pictures of the bone knife with my manly camera and they all looked below average!
i worked up a sweat just scrolling down to read the whole thing.